


unsere fröhlichen kräfte (zeigen sich in diesen tanzenden tränen)

by kafkas



Category: Elisabeth - Levay/Kunze
Genre: Breathplay, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Historical References, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Underage, M/M, Non-Chronological, gotta love those tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 13:06:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9658607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafkas/pseuds/kafkas
Summary: Sometimes getting what you want can be just as bad as getting what you don't.





	

**Author's Note:**

> \- Title and excerpts are both from Rilke.  
> \- It's assumed historically that Stéphanie was unable to bear a male heir for the throne due to contracting a venereal disease from Rudolf, although this isn't explored in great detail within the story itself.  
> \- Characterisation is based mostly off of the 2015 tour with Mark Seibert as Der Tod, although honestly feel free to imagine whoever you want.

 

_Often when I imagine you_

_your wholeness cascades into many shapes._

_You run like a herd of luminous deer_

_and I am dark, I am forest._

 

 

The first time Rudolf sees Mary Vetsera, it is through the wooden slats of her black oriental fan. Tod watches the exchange from the darkest corners of the room, an exchange so bright and sparking it is like the sudden burst of a camera flash, preserved forever in the amber light of the ballroom. Vetsera’s eyes are very dark – so dark, in fact, that you would think they were black, yet they are not. Rather, an implacable emerald green. To look into them is to be soothed.

Rudolf is soothed. Rudolf stares and stares. Vetsera stares back. Tod sees her fan flutter almost imperceptibly, then pick up speed.

 

 

 

Rudolf makes a fool of himself, of course. He always does when he is in love. Spills his drink in the banquet hall; stumbles his way through the ecossaise, apologizing profusely to the baroness for his clammy hands. Once, he sees Tod watching him and grows pale and wary eyed, has to excuse himself. Tod finds him standing outside beneath one of the palace awnings, sheathed in a curtain of rain.

‘You’re back,’ he says, a little afraid, mostly haughty. Rudolf has been in England for three months, recuperating. Doubtless he had expected his friend to follow him there.

‘I had business to attend to.’

Rudolf sucks in a long breath. ‘I’m so tired _._ You promised me that one day soon –’

‘The world doesn’t just ground to a halt because you got a bad case of the clap.’

Rudolf stares at him for a long time, expression twisted in a way that makes Tod think he might be about to cry. Then, miraculously, he begins to laugh.

‘I’ve missed you.’

‘You seem to be doing just fine without me.’

‘Yes, but it’s not _fine_ , is it? You know, father’s rejected all of my proposals.’

‘He’ll come around.’

‘Will he?’ Rudolf laughs again, a worried, bubbling thing, ‘That’s nice.’

They stand in silence for a while, until Tod begins to wonder if he has faded unwittingly from Rudolf’s perceptions. But the crown prince is only watching the rain.

‘Stéphanie isn’t speaking to me,’ he murmurs. He holds his hand out, creates a part in the water.

‘No, I imagine not.’

‘Nobody is. I can’t go back to my apartments. It’s like a funeral parlor. What am I going to do?’

‘That’s up to you to decide.’

‘When I was a boy you said that you would always be there to help me,’ Rudolf hisses, rounding on him. His fingers are balled into tiny, white-knuckled fists.

‘That is true.’

‘So _help me._ ’

Tod shakes his head, smiling softly.

‘First you’ve got to help yourself.’

Rudolf lets out a cry of frustration and turns away. _He’s still young_ , Tod thinks. _A boy, really_. For all of Franz Joseph’s efforts to brutalize him, Rudolf has somehow retained most of his sensitivity. He feels a faint swell of pride at that. But then, anything he ever feels towards Rudolf is faint. The brunt of his feelings are borne for Elisabeth and Elisabeth alone.

‘I’ll see you again,’ he murmurs, tender despite all of this.

‘Mm,’ a choked sound, from the back of the crown prince’s throat.

After a moment of deliberation, Tod reaches out and lays the arch of his palm against the exposed skin of Rudolf’s nape. He sees Rudolf stiffen, shivering. Whether this is from the cold or from something else he is never entirely sure. Humans are strange.

‘Continue to do as I say, and all will be well,’ he whispers, mouth at Rudolf’s ear, hand still firm about his neck, ‘You will be Kaiser, even if you have to secede from your father’s court. All will be well and one day soon, I promise, I will _have_ you.’

Rudolf wrenches himself away, breathing heavily.

‘You speak out of turn!’

‘Do I? You’ve thought it many times yourself – this I know for a fact.’

‘That may be so but I’d never – my father, he’d –’ Rudolf composes himself, spreading his hands in defiance, ‘I do not wish to _secede_ from the Austrian court, my friend.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Tod says, soft, sibilant, seductive, ‘talking about the court.’

 

 

 

Part of him thinks that he loves Elisabeth because, as the old adage goes, she makes him feel alive. Or not alive, but grounded. With her he does not have to focus his every will on remaining solid and in one place. With her he can, for a moment at least, block out the wailed pleas of the dead and dying.

Several times he tries to foist himself on her – because isn’t that what all living men wish to do? – hands rough and mitt-like in their fumbling. Her smooth, cream shoulders. The long, swan’s line of her neck. Soft, plum mouth; silver bell voice. These things overwhelm him. He cannot look at them head on, cannot touch the Kaiserin without feeling burnt. She is exquisitely cruel and she doesn’t even know it.

Rudolf is different. Rudolf, he tells himself, is a passing fancy, although he has been a passing fancy for many years now. He was there when the crown prince was born – taking the register. Barely an hour outside of his mother’s womb and Franz Joseph was already fitting him out for a military regiment. Tod had felt a glimmer of pity for the bundle of silks cossetted in Elisabeth’s arms and that in itself had surprised him. Who was this ruddy-cheeked thing, this mewling thing, that it deserved such attentions?

The kitten had come later, of course, as had the plot. But for the moment, Rudolf was simply that: a passing fancy. He comes for Elisabeth during her periods of great despair; shies away from her cream shoulders, her swan’s neck, but finds other ways to assert himself. Better ways.

And he always lingers for Rudolf. Watches him grow from sullen boy to miserable teenager, into an adult who hides his misery well but not well enough, drowning it in palace politics and Viennese whores.

He will reflect, later on, that it was probably destiny. For what pull is stronger than that between two men who both love the same woman, yet cannot have her?

 

 

 

Princess Stéphanie is, he suspects, smarter than most people assume. The first night Tod catches her, she is bent over the bathroom sink in the imperial apartments at Hofburg, retching and weeping and considering maybe ending it all here with Rudolf’s ivory shaving razor. It is the night of her wedding to the crown prince and he has rejected her – her! With all of her perfumes and glittering raiment!

Tod has always held a special affection for the distress of young girls. It is so unchecked, so volatile, whereas young boys are only wont to bottle things up. She looks at him in the mirror, with her tear-streaked face, her wild blonde hair, and recognizes him almost immediately.

‘Well?’ she snaps, not afraid, not yet, ‘Have at it, then.’

Tod slides open the shaving razor deftly, examines the worn sweep of its grip, the shining white arc of its blade.

‘It’ll hurt,’ he remarks, with a quirk of the brow. Stéphanie blanches at that. She’d known – she’s not stupid, after all – but to hear it put into words –

‘He doesn’t love me, does he?’

‘No. How could he? He doesn’t know you at all.’

‘Sometimes you can tell…’

‘Not this time. I was there at the altar at Saint Augustine. I saw the fear in his eyes. He’s just as frightened as you are.’

‘When I took of my clothes, he looked as if he might be sick.’

‘If it’s any consolation, he often looks as if he might be sick. It’s a look he’s inherited from his father.’

Stéphanie does not find this amusing. She turns, regards herself in the mirror. There’s snot smeared about her nose. Her mouth is slack and moist. Slowly, she begins to button her peignoir.

‘Do you think he could come to love me?’

‘It’s not in my place to say.’

‘Then what are you _for_?’ she glances at him sharply. For one glittering moment he is reminded of Elisabeth, but then she rescinds, ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that they’ve all been so cruel. I don’t know what to think anymore. He said that he loved me in Brussels. But now he can’t even look at me. And his mother –’ she chokes on a sob, then moans: ‘Oh, I want to go home. I want to see Mama and Papa. What am I doing here?’

‘Your duty,’ Tod murmurs. He strokes the razor enticingly, but the idea has flown from Stéphanie’s mind. She reaches down to splash water in her face.

‘You know, I didn’t know I’d have to do – that.’ She casts a wary glance at the door, beyond which lays the marital bed. ‘I don’t know why I thought I wouldn’t. The thought just never popped into my head.’

 _You are a child,_ Tod wants to say, _Of course you didn’t know._

He wonders where Rudolf is right now. Stalking the palace corridors, no doubt. Seeking out his mother. Rudolf is just as disgusted by this as Elisabeth is. He’ll want to have the marriage annulled. He will be refused. He will take out his frustrations on Stéphanie, on his father, on the Empire.

That swell of pride – that swell of affection – warms the cold cavern of his chest. Rudolf will destroy. Rudolf will rage. And all Tod will have to do is sit back and watch the show.

Stéphanie picks a stray eyelash off of her dampened cheek and regards him wearily, as if she can read his thoughts.

‘You can go,’ she says, with a wave of her hand, ‘Shan’t be needing you, I think. Better his friend than mine.’

Tod lets himself fade away, but leaves her with some departing words.

‘I’ll always come if you call.’

Stéphanie smiles back at him droopily. She only ever uses the one corner of her mouth.

‘I’m sure you say that to everyone you visit.’

 

 

 

‘Do you love her, then? Your little sultana?’

‘I like her well enough,’ Rudolf lies. He loves her deeply. Loves her for all her parvenu manners and her hidden vulgarities; her surprised bark of a laugh, her voice when she is drunk, low and rumbling. Rudolf doesn’t ever think he’s met somebody so alive.

This is, Tod supposes, how Elisabeth had felt upon meeting the Kaiser; and where Joseph may have his faults, Tod’s will always, always outweigh them. He may still be the dark prince of Sissi’s childhood but his hands are nevertheless stiff and cold, his breath stale from an eon spent rattling about his lungs. She will never want him in that way.

Rudolf wants him, violently. He can see it in his growing frustrations – in the ferocity of his gaze. He wants to be filled where he is lacking, consumed where he is all too much. Rudolf wants to be taken under. But taking someone, stealing them away, is not the same thing as loving them. Tod thinks somewhere along the line the boy may have gotten the two mixed up.

He is mistaken in thinking that any of Tod’s intentions towards him are – savory.

 

 

 

November. The torrential rains of autumn have turned to snow. Baroness Mary Vetsera is spotted at the opera with a man bearing strong resemblance to the Crown Prince of Austria. The coffee houses are alive with gossip.

Now, Rudolf sits at his desk, going over the final drafts for the last political essay he will ever write. It is late at night and all of the candles have burnt down to the wick. Despite his illness, the prince still cuts a handsome figure in the half-light, stern-jawed and serious.

‘You’ve been busy.’ Tod, hiding in the shadows.

‘And you’ve dawdled.’

Tod comes into the light. There are harsh lines about his mouth and beneath his eyes. Elisabeth has been particularly scornful of late. If Rudolf notices this as he passes him the finished papers, he doesn’t say anything.

‘Where’s the princess?’ Tod asks, leaning against Rudolf’s desk, surveying the apartments.

‘With Valerie. She and Salvator leave for Italy tomorrow.’

‘Ah.’

Rudolf’s pen continues to scratch across the parchment for what seems like a millennia, filling the silence of the office. Then, at last, he pushes everything away and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, sighing deeply.

‘It’s too much for a man to take,’ he mumbles, and Tod does not go as far as to ask him what he means. He only takes up the crown prince’s face in his cool hands and regards him fondly.

‘You ought to return to Bad Ischl. Take up bird watching again.’

Rudolf fixes him with a hard stare.

‘You did not say that last Christmas.’

‘You were not running yourself into the ground last Christmas.’

Rudolf drops his gaze, dark lashes fanning out across his cheeks. _He really is very pretty_ , Tod thinks. If only in that he would be so easy for him to break.

‘You don’t think I’m up to the task.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

Rudolf’s mouth twists sadly. ‘That may be so, but I know you don’t. You’ve got that look in your eye. The same look as father.’

‘What look?’

‘Like I’m something to be pitied –something trivial –’ and again, that hard stare, ‘Am I amusing to you?’

Tod beams. ‘Would it be so terrible if you were?’

‘Sometimes I think that’s all I am to you. Amusing. Sometimes I think you don’t care for me at all.’

Tod’s smile disappears abruptly and he slaps Rudolf once, hard across the face. He feels a dull satisfaction in the way the crown prince gasps, tears springing into his eyes.

‘Foolish child,’ he growls, ‘Do not ever presume that you know _a thing_ about the way I _feel_ –’

Rudolf clamps a hand to his mouth, horrified.

‘I’ve offended you.’

Tod snorts with derision and slides to his feet. He begins to walk away, only to have Rudolf catch him by the crook of his elbow.

‘Don’t go,’ he sobs, suddenly nothing but a frightened, lonely boy, desperate for affection.

Tod stills in his step.

‘Do you _want_ me to stay?’

Rudolf nods, blinking away his tears. He’s lying, Tod can tell, but – well. He’s always been loath to deny the crown prince a favor.

Sometimes getting what you want can be just as bad as getting what you don’t.

 

 

 

When Rudolf is nine he fells his first stag and is sick for days afterwards. Elisabeth insists that it was too soon, that a boy so young should not be made to stand the sight of blood. Kindhearted Thurmburg agrees with her, despite the sharp looks he receives from Franz Joseph and his mother.

Tod has seen this many times before. Elisabeth calling the boy sensitive when all he really is is pussyfooted. Going unseen, he rolls his eyes, and follows the wet nurse up the stairs towards Rudolf’s room. This is a trip he will make many times over.

 

 

 

‘Sometimes I think about killing him,’ Stéphanie murmurs. They are together in the Burggarten; Tod watching the trees sway in the wind from beneath a linen umbrella, Stéphanie resplendent in her white dress, supine atop a pile of white pillows. There is a platter of cold meat spread out before them, a carafe of mineral water. Stéphanie has just heard the news from the doctor. Tod is reminded once more of Elisabeth.

‘Sometimes, when he’s sleeping, I sit there like this –’ weakly, she reaches for one of her pillows and clenches it in her hands, ‘and I think about doing it.’

‘You don’t suppose he sees you?’

Stéphanie shakes her head.

‘If he’d seen me, I’d be dead already. He can’t trust anybody. Every day he grows more paranoid.’

‘So why don’t you do it?’

Stéphanie frowns. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t love him, but I’m not afraid of him either. Maybe it’s fate. Maybe it’s God telling me, “No, Stéphanie, it is not his time.” Who knows? Why don’t _you_ do it?’

Tod reaches for the carafe. ‘Me?’

Stéphanie is silent, expectant.

Tod pours himself a glass of mineral water. He doesn’t require it but - well, there's always some fun to be had in playing pretend. 

‘I like Rudolf,’ he says, simply, ‘Why would I want to kill him?’

Stéphanie presses her fingertips to the bridge of her nose. ‘Please show me some respect and refrain from lying to me.’

‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’

Stéphanie glances up at him churlishly.

‘I see you, you know, all of the time, and I’ve seen the way you look at my husband. In Damascus, it was like you wanted to eat him alive. And again, in Centinje. I think that you hate him.’

Tod has to bite down on his laughter.

‘That’s a novel thought.’ He squeezes the princess’s shoulder and she leans into the touch, too exhausted to be afraid anymore. He smiles.

‘It’s _not_ his time, Stéphanie,’ he murmurs, ‘but it’s not yours either.’

 

 

 

The first time Rudolf and Mary make love, he winds up weeping against her breast; horrible, heaving sobs that wrack his frame and frighten her terribly. She coos at him in French, asks the more important questions in German.

_Mon amour, mon ange, mon héros._

_Wer tat dies auch Sie?_

_Wer ließ Sie weinen?_

Rudolf presses his wet face into the soft, cream skin of her shoulder, shuddering. The problem is not that he had been unprepared, or that it had hurt him in any way. After all, there have been so many, many women.

The problem is that maybe he had wanted it to hurt.

 

 

 

The first time they fuck, Rudolf is twenty-one and is being sent away with the army at his father’s orders. Up until now, he’s only been a mild-mannered, soft-spoken young man with a keen interest in ornithology. But now he wants lessons in fighting.

Tod is – good, at killing. It’s a skill that rather comes with the territory. But he is also good at violence, having witnessed it in its many ways, shapes and forms, and that is a talent he has honed down to a fine art over the centuries. He has Rudolf pinned in less than a minute, winded and panting on the carpet beneath him.

‘Again,’ says the crown prince, and so they clamber to their feet and resume their stances. This time, Rudolf bats him hard about the ear – hard enough to send any normal human being spinning – but Tod will not relent. He kicks and bites, bloodies Rudolf’s nose, cracks his head against the wall, because historically the only way to ever win a battle is to fight dirty.

And suddenly, there is stillness. He can hear Rudolf’s heart hammering against the palm of his hand, still holding him to the wall. Can feel the way his hips cant upwards, as they had on the carpet, frantic and unbidden. Slowly, experimentally, Tod shifts his arm a tic, pressing the sharp jut of it up to the crown prince’s throat. He sees Rudolf swallow, and his lips are slick, teeth lacquered red with blood.

 _Elisabeth,_ he thinks, _would have a heart attack._

‘You –’ Rudolf stares at him wildly. He’s trying to find a way to blame him for this but is coming up wanting. Tod leans forward, presses one black-clad thigh between Rudolf’s legs and revels in the way the boy moans – high and quavering, miserable and terrified.

‘This is wrong,’ he gasps, even as his fingers grapple at Tod’s shirtsleeves, even as he rocks against his ministrations, ‘This is wicked, this is – it is a trespass against God –’

Tod buries face in the shuddering hitch of Rudolf’s shoulder, mouths at his neck like a wild animal tearing at some poor creature’s carcass. Rudolf whines, hapless. He brings his hands up to tug at Tod’s hair, oddly bold in his desperation.

‘You would see me condemned,’ he chokes, breath a hot puff against Tod's cheek. Tod nods vaguely. He would. He’d even turn his head, if it meant destroying Elisabeth. He’d kiss Rudolf here and now if it meant securing her fealty.

But – not like this. This would be too easy. Where is the suffering? Where is the heartache? No, better to turn Rudolf into a weapon first. A tool. Ultimately, that will be what hurts her the most.

Tod pulls away a scant distance, takes in the crown prince’s ruined dress uniform; his robin’s egg blue coat, the buttery gold of his sword sheath. He picks at a button, thoughtful, then moves his hand lower. Rudolf jerks in his grasp whilst at once pressing himself back against the wall.

Tod pauses, gaze flickering up. He’s got very strange eyes. Rudolf has always thought this. Like smooth marbled glass, reflecting nothing.

‘Do you want me to stop?’ he asks, and his arm is pressed so tightly against Rudolf’s throat that he’s seeing stars. The feeling is both sickening and arousing. Or maybe it’s sickening _because_ it is arousing.

Rudolf trembles. Rudolf nods.

 

 

 

Sometimes getting what you want can be just as bad as getting what you don’t.

 

 

 

In Lacroma, things between he and Stéphanie are even more delicate than usual. They do not speak. Stéphanie spends long hours in the library, reading and sketching as she had as a child, while her father had ignored her in favor of the sickly heir apparent; writing long letters to some Polish count she has supposedly fallen in love with. Rudolf rises early, swims against the ocean tide until he is ragged with exhaustion. His hair hangs into his eyes, grimy with sand. He staggers from the shallows and collapses onto the pebbly beach, sicking up down the front of his bathing costume.

When they return to Vienna, Elisabeth is there to greet them. A stiff smile for Stéphanie, a faltering embrace for her son. She smooths her hand across his brow, fitting the thumb of the other into the space below his bottom lip. Her glance is so tender, so confused, that for a moment Rudolf feels as if he is in the presence of a child. Feels that perhaps she has finally lost her wits.

Then, something shifts. She has found what she’s wanted. Her mouth seals itself into a thin, pale line. Her fingers pull at his jaw, insisting that he meet her gaze.

 _Watch yourself, mein Sohn,_ she seems to say, and nothing more.

Rudolf squirms. He looks to Stéphanie for assistance but the princess has already departed, the valet scrambling to catch up with her. He looks back to his mother: _Why should I?_

 _You know why,_ Elisabeth replies, in the narrowing of her eyes, in the muscle that works at the edge her cheek. She releases him then and her hand is shaking as it slides across Rudolf’s shoulder, down the length of his arm, to squeeze his hand. Just once. It’s only ever once.

It will be the last time she touches him.

 

 

 

‘“Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.”’

‘What on earth is that?’

‘Heine.’

‘Well he sounds miserable.’

‘Mother loves Heine,’ Rudolf murmurs, fiddling with his reading spectacles. Mary arrests the movement, fingers tracing round each of his nails, the curve of an ear.

‘Your mother loves a lot of things. Do you think she’d love me?’

‘She’d think you were sweet.’

‘Then read me something sweet. Does Heine do sweet?’

‘No sweet. He’s too fantastic.’

‘Well then read me something happy.’

Rudolf frowns, removing his glasses all together. ‘Why?’ He hunkers down into the pillows, so that he can look her in the eye. ‘Are you _un_ happy?’

‘Not when I’m with you.’

‘But when you aren’t?’

Mary sucks on her bottom lip. Rudolf tracks the movement distractedly. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m – euphoric. Mostly I’m just fine.’

‘“Just fine”?’

‘Mmhmm.’

‘Well, we shall have to work on that, won’t we?’ Rudolf chuckles, and kisses her. He does not notice the tears in Mary’s eyes. He is too intent on repressing his own.

 

 

 

Mary is beautiful when she dances. Mary is lithe and rosy, always moving where Stéphanie would only ever sit still. Rudolf watches her from across the ballroom, smiling faintly because that is how he has learnt to smile at the women he’s loved. Anything more and people might suspect something.

Suddenly though, he sees Mary stop, detaching from her partner, gaze fixed on something across the room. Rudolf looks, but it is only Mary’s sister Hélène, speaking animatedly with Countess Larisch. He looks back and Mary has gone white, hands brought up to her chest in a worried clasp. Her mouth is working as if she were being spoken to, as if she were attempting to interrupt. Then she looks to him, and her green eyes are full of anguish.

The dark arm at her waist of course goes unnoticed, as does the cruel and unhappy smile. Nevertheless, Rudolf feels a cold spike of fear.

Something is about to go horribly, irrevocably wrong.

 

 

 

On the morning of his wedding, Rudolf downs a whole bottle of Schlitzer and cannot properly button his shirt. Tod is there to help him though and somehow they have him ready and bundled off to the church at the appropriate time. It is then that Rudolf breaks down entirely. Tod does not embrace him – for the awkward jolt carriage will not allow it – but merely allows the prince to bury his face in his shoulder, arms hanging limply at his sides, until he is all cried out.

They do not speak of it. Tod isn’t sure if the boy even remembers. _He_ remembers, however, and often, and always feels strangely sick at the sound of Rudolf’s retching, and at his utter composure upon stepping out onto the pavement at Saint Augustine’s.

He’s never been certain why.

 

 

 

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

The cold fingers, which have until now been gliding over the surface of Elisabeth’s milk-bath, still.

‘So should you.’

‘I _am_ ashamed.’

‘And yet you hate me.’

‘I’d cut out your foul heart and eat it raw if I thought you were even in possession of one.’

‘I’m so glad we understand each other.’

 

 

 

He awakens one night to find Stéphanie stood at the foot of his bed, body so cloistered in shadow that her bust appears almost to float. Her eyes flash wetly, gold like oil in the light of the gas lamp that she clutches. In her other hand is a tumbler of warm milk. In this way, at least, she remains a child.

‘Is it morning?’ Rudolf croaks, and reaches for the drapes.

‘No. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Oh.’ He lets his hand drop. Her side of the bed, he notices, is cold.

‘Been off to see the Count?’

‘Been off to see Mitzi Kaspar?’ she shoots back, without change in expression, ‘Or perhaps it’s that little Vetsera whore today, hmm?’

‘Don’t do that,’ Rudolf sighs, rubbing his eyes, ‘Don’t be cruel.’

‘Why? Because I’m telling the truth?’

‘Because it’s not _you_ ,’ Rudolf smiles at her, not unkindly, ‘It’s me.’

Stéphanie sips her milk. She makes no movement to get into bed. Her hand rests on her hip, contemplative.

‘You know, I used to think I hated you. You were like Albrecht and I was Giselle. Only you weren’t lying about being a prince, you were lying about being in love with me. And isn’t that just worse?’

‘I wouldn’t know, I don’t like ballet.’

Stéphanie glares at him. ‘Maybe I do still hate you.’

‘But don’t stop. I’m interested to hear where you were going with this, waking me up at some god awful hour.’

Stéphanie takes another sip of milk, and speaks her next words around the rim of her glass so that for weeks Rudolf will think he has misheard.

‘I pity you.’

 

 

 

Mary had dropped so suddenly after he’d shot her; bowled over, as if by an oncoming train. As she’d collided with the wall, her head had slumped at an odd angle, which Rudolf is now correcting. He doesn’t know why he does it – it’s not as if she’s going to wake with a crick in her neck. He doesn’t know why his hands aren’t shaking, or why his heart does not pound. Things hardly seems real.

Mary’s thick, dark hair covers the worst of the wound, although a lone droplet has cut a path down her brow. He smooths the pad of his thumb over it, here black, now smearing red. He closes her soothing green eyes. He says a prayer.

Behind him, a floorboard creaks. A cold hand catches his wrist, moves his hand away from Mary’s face before coming to rest at the base of his scull.

 _Measuring it up,_ Rudolf thinks, nonsensical.

‘You’re ready now, aren’t you?’ Tod murmurs.

Rudolf is silent. Mary has such lovely lips, full and pink, though growing paler now. He’s not sure if he ever told her.

‘It will only hurt for the smallest of moments,’ Tod crouches down, retrieving Rudolf’s ceremonial pistol, ‘Then you can finally rest.’

‘Will Mary be there to greet me?’ Absurd, when he is looking right at her. When her skin is still warm beneath his fingers. _A little girl_ – comes the despairing cry from deep within him. What has he done?

Tod pulls him to his feet, holds him close. ‘They’ll all be there, Rudolf. Your baby sister and your grandmamma. Your rebel friends killed by dragoons. Everybody.’

‘And you? Will you be there?’

‘Sometimes. Most times. I’ll always come if you call.’

‘It would be nice, not to be alone.’

Tod presses the pistol into Rudolf’s hands. On some other level, it occurs to Rudolf that his friend has never been this gentle with him before. Up until now his touches have always been rough or, if not rough, then at least firm. Now they are feather light.

‘I’m so… sorry, Rudolf, that it has come to this.’ The apology comes out almost garbled, for how hard he has gritted his teeth. He has won, so why does he feel as if he is being robbed?

The crown prince is, at least, complacent. He presses the barrel to his temple with a steady grip, and his eyes are warm and forgiving. And they are calm too – so very calm. He has waited his whole life for this, after all. What cause has he to be afraid?

When the time comes, Rudolf tilts his mouth to greet him and Tod imagines that he can still feel him smile, even as the shot sounds out.

 

 

 

_Time and time again we rip the god apart._

_Pressing our ears against the flashing sky,_

_We listen for the beating of his heart._

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [♫](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytdjYjM-cLg)


End file.
